Each Monday morning Campus Announcements is sent by electronic mail to all active New York State and Research Foundation employees, and any alums, retirees, students, FSA employees, affiliates, or community members that have subscribed to receive the mailing.

Collaborative Learning Areas or CoLAs are special spaces that are built to facilitate group work, projects, and study. Unlike SINC Sites, CoLAs are designed to allow groups of students to work together on projects and other assignments.

Stony Brook University maintains an electronic post office (EPO) for all students, faculty and staff. The EPO is essentially a mail forwarding device that allows everyone at the University to have the same generic email address (@stonybrook.edu) so that no matter what email system Stony Brook may adopt or what domain names change, people will still receive their email.

Google Apps for Education is the primary email system for everyone at Stony Brook University except Hospital employees and members of the School of Medicine and School of Dental Medicine. Stony Brook's Google Apps suite of products includes Mail, Calendar, Drive, Contacts, Sites, Groups, Hangouts and a host of other applications to enhance communication and collaboration across campus.

InterCall is Stony Brook's preferred vendor for teleconference servcies. A reservationless teleconferencing system, InterCall combines flexibility with powerful and easy-to-use features. It supplies operator-assisted services to those individuals requiring larger or more high-profile teleconferences. The service is available 24/7 and can accommodate up to 125 people per conference.

DoIT offers L-Soft's LISTSERV, a special program available to set up large mailing lists. A list can be established for any department, course, or registered student group, but not for an individual's personal use.

Lotus Notes was a server-based email system used by faculty and staff at Stony Brook University for many years. It was replaced by Google Apps for Education in 2012, but some departments still access important Lotus Notes/Domino applications. The plan is to completely decommission the service by December 2013.

DoIT feeds information from PeopleSoft and other systems into the campus phone directory and people search online directory. In compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), student data is not accessible from Stony Brook's People Search tool, only that of faculty, staff, and emeritus.

SB Alert is the University's emergency notification system used to alert the campus community of major emergencies, immediate threats or impending situations that could pose harm, disrupt classes, impact facilities, activities, or other operations.

SBConnect is a powerful system used for online collaboration and Web conferencing. It is available at Stony Brook University for departments and courses, and is managed and provided by the Teaching, Learning + Technology Department (TLT). With SBConnect, you can communicate ideas by sharing your desktop, virtual whiteboards, documents, powerpoint presentations and video files; using a webcam, microphone and/or chat window. These sessions can be recorded as podcasts or on-demand sessions.

SharePoint Online (or Sites which is part of the University's Office 365 application suite) provides collaborative websites for groups such as research teams, committees, and course-related activities. While DoIT encourages students, faculty, and staff to first investigate Google Drive or Google Sites to handle collaborative projects among teams, SharePoint is certainly a viable alternative. SharePoint is HIPAA and export compliant.

VoiceThread is a web-based application that allows you to place media artifacts such as images, presentations, videos and documents and have an asynchronous discussion around it. A VoiceThread lets people interact with various content and their peers by allowing comments using any mix of text, microphone, webcam, drawing tools, telephone, or uploaded audio file. VoiceThread is also accessable and made to be compatible with screen reader technology at: http://voicethread.com/universal/.

Yammer is Stony Brook's internal social network. It is an online environment for discussion and conversation. It can help you get work done and to support teamwork and collaboration across the institution.